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Will Sound Be Cinema’s Killer App?

By Eric A. Taub October 27, 2009 12:53 pmOctober 27, 2009 12:53 pm

To keep audiences coming to movie theaters, the cinema experience needs to be sufficiently different from what one can experience at home. The problem is that virtually every distinguishing technology that the theatrical business has created is eventually replicated by television.

TVs with large displays, digital surround sound, wide-aspect ratio screens and high-definition images are increasingly within the reach of many consumers. Even high-quality 3-D TV, which theater owners once expected to be theirs exclusively, will be available on HDTVs beginning next year.

But now some in the industry think they’ve found the one thing that television can’t (yet) replicate: 3-D sound.

Iosono, a company founded by Karlheinz Brandenburg–one of the creators of the MP3 compression standard–is promoting a system that adds an extraordinary sense of depth to theater sound. Rather than use a handful of speakers on all four walls, Iosono creates a sound experience by employing more than 600 speakers.

With this system and the proper algorithms for playing it, there are no longer any sound “hot spots,” places in the theater where the audio effect is better than others. Iosono gives every listener the same experience, which includes the illusion that sound is filling the room, or even occurring outside the theater.

I’ve heard the Iosono system twice, first four years ago and then again last week at Hollywood’s Todd-AO sound stages. When I first heard it, the Iosono people demonstrated a very neat parlor trick: even though I was at least 15 feet from any wall, they were able to create the illusion that someone was whispering inches from my ear, walking behind me and then whispering in my other ear.

That technique works in 32 points within a theater, not enough to use it except to impress those in the right seats. But what can be experienced by everyone in the theater is an extra-ordinary depth of sound. The difference between it and standard surround sound is comparable to that of listening to a monaural track through headphones and then switching to a stereo version. The audio takes on a vividness that I’ve not experienced in a theater.

The most obvious application: pairing Iosono’s system with 3-D films for a high-dimensional experience. With the number of speakers needed to create the illusion, it’s unlikely that a home version will be created any time soon.

Iosono has equipped Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood with Iosono but as of yet, no studio has signed on to produce a film with the sound system; Iosono says an announcement of its first studio partner is imminent and that three or four feature films will include an Iosono mix in 2010, with even more the year after. The company also expects 50 theaters in the United States to be Iosono-equipped next year.

As always, the bigger question is who’s going to pay for this? Iosono installations will cost up to $150,000 per screen (and Iosono sound mixes will add about $200,000 to a film’s budget).

Under the financing scheme that Iosono is developing, theater owners will borrow the installation costs from the company and then recoup through higher ticket prices or by showing a large number of Iosono-encoded films.

But until financing gets worked out, Iosono will remain a very good idea waiting for its moment on the big screen.

I don’t find this piece very convincing. I think ‘3-D sound’ will be EASILY implemented in home settings. (Probably more easily than decent 3-D video will be). With inexpensive microprocessors and easily hidden single-driver speakers; the effect should not be difficult to replicate at home. I recently listened to a friend’s sophisticated sound system play a quadrophonic (4-channel) version of a Pink Floyd album and the ‘soundstage’ effect was extraordinary.

I am not in the Iosono demographic, that’s for sure. I suffer through the endless theater trailers, especially those with hyped up sound tracks played at a volume that can be pleasurable only to those young enough to have suffered premature hearing loss from insanely loud concerts and headphones.

At home, on my modest flat panel and very good sound system, I sacrifice visual impact for the pleasure of having control over the volume.

It’s all about screen size. It just does not seem like a truly theater experience to me if the screen is not 50 feet across. I couldn’t care less what the sound is. I’d happily pay double to go see a movie at the Ziegfeld rather than the multiplex, because I’m getting more than double the screen size. I’m often in conversation with the box office at the theater deciding which film to see primarily by the size of the screen it is showing on. What killed the cinema industry is not big televisions, but rather small theater screens.

This has existed in the Pro Audio world for years. The two big players are Meyer Sound’s Constellation and LARES. They both use the same basic theory of using a lot of speakers to generate a new listening environment.

Personally, before we move into 3D sound at theaters, I would love just to get good sound at every theater. Right now, most movie theater sound is just very loud and very bass heavy. Better sound, combined with digital projectors, would sell more tickets.

How about they invent a volume control–namely, volume DOWN. Action movies are just too loud for me to want to see at the cinema. These days, the audio experience at the movies is like munching on sugar cubes for dessert.

Yamaha has sold their sound projectors for years. They use dozens of small one inch speakers to do exactly what this article mentions and cost less than eight hundred dollars.
I’ve got one. It’s great.

Theater’s don’t need new sound to draw in audidence– they need actual, god to honest, decent movies with STORY.

I don’t go to movie theaters, or the movies, because with a few exception’s there’s nothing playing that’s worth seeing. As soon as the movie studios start producing quality movies again, the audiences will follow.

Why, yes, of course I would love to pay more for tickets to go see a movie that inevitably will fail to live up to my expectations…Just so I can hear the sound in “3D”…Now, if they could just figure out a way to quiet the sounds of people talking, munching on popcorn, tearing their way into the candy boxes, or the screaming babies thing, I would be more than happy to listen to what theater owners have to say!

I go to 200+ movies a year in public theatres. Unless you have a $50,000 sound system and 30 foot screen in your home there is no comparison.

People who watch movies at home do it for the convenience and the price and somehow convince themselves the quality is comparable. They are in denial. It is not and never will be until you spend the money and replicate a theatre, same sound system, same acoustics, same lighting, and same size, at home.

I agree that sound plays an important role for the motion picture experience, and in some cases is more important than video. The Iosono system costs too much for theater chains to put in place, and requires 600 speakers…that is ridiculous. I heard a new technology from GenAudio called AstoundSurround, that does the same thing that Iosono does for theatrical audio mixing, providing the same audio experience, with no sweet spot, and best of all, it only requires two channel audio, with no special hardware for decoding, so it can be used both in theaters and home theaters. This seems like a solution that will truly work for both theatrical and home theater, so why all the hype about a 600 speaker solution, not to mention the fact that many theater chain auditoriums do not have the budget to implement the Iosono system, and with this new AstoundSurround technology, it works with everything as the exist today. I think their website has some demos you can check out, although, they do not mention anything about how it really applies to films, the demo I attended at the Producers and Engineers Wing for the Grammy’s last year was astounding to say the least.

I can definitely appreciate good cinema sound. My main disappointment with the latest “Star Trek” movie was that the soundtrack sounded bad on the tinny, weak sound system employed by the theater where I saw it. To contrast, I absolutely loved the soundtrack of the latest Batman movie, which I saw in IMAX, with it’s 50,000 watts of sound and perforated screen and so-forth. I wonder how a system like the one described about would compare with that used by current IMAX movies (and traditional films converted for IMAX).

Listeners can experience such spatial effects, or any other effects the sound studios create, by wearing headphones. (Sound designed to be heard through headphones is called “binaural,” which is different from “stereo.” A well made binaural recording heard through headphones has a very convincing sense of space all around and even above the listener.) If moviegoers are willing to wear glasses to see 3D video, they might be willing to use headphones–such as their own iPod earbuds–that plug into jacks on the armrest, just as in an airplane. The theater could simultaneously have normal loudspeakers for those not wearing headphones, and for delivering the physical punch of deep bass. This seems like a much cheaper solution than installing hundreds of speakers in each theater.

I really enjoy good sound quality at a movie theater. The thing is that it would be pointless to have 600 speakers set up because, as you can see (from previous comments), most people don’t care about the quality. Some people can’t even differentiate between mp3 format and regular 16 bit CD format, and most people just use those awful earphone that you jam into your ears so they end up getting used to the really bad sound quality of sound these days (GENERALLY speaking…).
And having 600 speakers doesn’t necesarilly have to be LOUDER, but have a much better spectrum.

I agree with Stephen Whitney’s comment which is actually a really good idea, to setup a good pair of headphones (not the ones you jam inside your ear), but you would be losing other aspects like the distance sensation, but can be compesated with lower frequency speakers setup normally to get the “feel” of the bumps and deeper sounds, but of course it would still not be the same thing.

Anyway!, I would love to experience the Iosono 3d sound
Cheers from Argentina!

Oh! almost forgot, answering BIG BILL’s comment 10/28/09 at 6.26 pm.
The sound cancellation headphones would be great to avoid that. It really gets on my nerves when I watch a movie and just hear the CRUNCHING and all the noises people make when they’re eating right behind you, or 15 year old punks being smartasses ruining the experience.

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